Barbarians at the Gate

db4objects has recently released a replication tool called dRS that
lets you exchange data not just with other db4o instances but with
relational database systems as well. This makes it easy to design
systems where a large enterprise data store contains information that
workers need to access from disconnected devices. This is a common
problem - a salesperson on the road needs customer data; someone
working in a warehouse needs to collect and propagate inventory
information; medical devices need to gather and process vast amounts of
data from a patient. In all these cases, mobile devices have limited
resources and have to exchange information with larger systems. db4o
excels at this.

Christof Wittig, CEO of db4objects, explains his company's decision to
release its software this way: "We live in a post-materialist world.
People don't have long lead times to do everything themselves. It's
only through collaboration that we can empower each other to succeed."
Asked why they support Open Source, "That's easy," he said. "We owe
everything to the community. From the outset, the user and developer
community have helped shape and refine the product design and
direction. We wouldn't have had that if we weren't Open Source. Even
more important, our product is already easy to use; Open Source means
that db4o is easy try and that in turn wins us customers."

db4objects, Inc. releases db4o under a dual-license model.
Manufacturers can choose a commercial license if doing proprietary
embedded work for a surprisingly modest price per unit. And if you want
to evaluate its use, are doing in-house work, or want to use db4o in
your own Open Source projects then you can use db4o freely under the
GPL.

Obviously we've been talking Java here, but developers who have to do
cross-platform development in heterogeneous environments will be
interested to know that there's a .NET version of db4o available as
well. The two are entirely binary-compatible; a number of its customers
are running db4o as the storage back-end on Java application servers
while writing their clients in little .NET programs. Yet-another
example of Open Source bringing communities together.

Open Source to Change the World For most people,
Open Source means cost free. But a growing number of people have come
to believe in the freedom that the Free Software movement preaches.
Freedom to innovate. Freedom to modify and to help others with your
work. It's the way the information age began.

Over the last few years an increasing amount of effort has been
invested in what I'll call Free Java. As ever, the word free is a tad
inadequate; the Open Source movement encourages you to realize that
their essential message is freedom as in liberty (to modify a program,
to enhance or reuse it as you see fit to redistribute) in addition to
the notably useful property of being free as in price (though many of
us gladly pay our distributor or vendor to package it all up and
provide us support).

Sun's Java VM is, of course, not free or Open Source and until recently
its license forbid redistributing Java binaries. So, not unexpectedly,
the free software community has been creating an implementation of Java
that does give you those freedoms.

The GNU Classpath project is working towards providing a fully
compatible set of class libraries and supports a dizzying array of Java
Virtual Machines - from research VMs like Kaffe and SableVM to the
quaint little JamVM to the rocketing CACAO and JikesRVM and the truly
radical GCJ project.

GCJ deserves special mention. Five or six years ago, hackers at Cygnus
(now part of Red Hat) realized that one way they could look at Java
would be to consider it a specifically defined subset of C++ (in the
same sense that XML is a specifically defined subset of SGML). They
reasoned that if they wrote a first-stage compiler that would take Java
in the front-end and spit out the tree representation used by the gcc
compiler internally, they could take advantage of the tremendous power
of the whole GCC suite behind it to optimize that code and link it to
binary executables that would run on any of the many platforms that GCC
already supports.

And, ta-da, one of the consequences of the Free Java effort is that you
can run Java programs on virtually every architecture out there. You
are no longer limited to the few platforms that the major vendors
create their runtimes for - a significant factor for embedded
developers. Concurrent efforts to create a tight but highly performing
garbage collector have meant that you can now create efficient and
optimized programs with small footprints that - gasp! - are written in
Java.

Ahead-of-time compilation (AOT) is somewhat unusual for us to think
about - we're quite used to the just-in-time compilation (JIT) that has
been part of commercial VMs since Java 1.1 days. JITs have a particular
challenge though - they have to turn the intermediate representation
(Java bytecode from a .class file) into native machine code fast enough
that the user doesn't notice. That's a tall order, yet it's amazing how
well modern VMs do it. There is, nevertheless, a limit to how much
optimization a JIT compiler can achieve because of the limited time it
has available. There's also a question of how much computing power is
taken to do JIT compilation - horsepower that may not be available,
especially on resource-limited machines like small embedded devices. By
doing the compilation of native machine code ahead of time, GCJ isn't
constrained by having to provide near-instantaneous compilation and has
the luxury of being able to try more in-depth optimizations. The result
is fast code and even better, there's no start-up penalty when a Java
program is launched. Instead of the overhead of instantiating a massive
VM and struggling through the JIT compilation of an enormous number of
core classes, the code is already native and can immediately start
executing - brilliant for small processes and desktop applications.

Red Hat, in particular, has invested significant effort into improving
GCJ and the Classpath libraries to achieve this outcome on both small
systems and enterprise servers. This has had impressive results: major
projects like Eclipse and JOnAS can be built native resulting in a
considerable performance boost. And if you're running the Fedora Core
Linux distribution then any time you install a Java library it will be
compiled native and transparently used to speed up your programs.

And there's even more to report from Free Java land. Recently a new
project being incubated by the Apache Foundation has emerged on the
scene. The effort, called Harmony, also aims to develop a fully
compatible Open Source class library and VM implementation. It doesn't
have much of a community behind it yet but it's been getting impressive
donations of code from several major players in the Java space.

So across-the-board activity is up. Amazingly, some lament the bevy of
choices maturing in the Java world, complaining that they have to
invest effort into figuring out which solution is best for them.
Ignoring for the moment that it has always taken hard work to figure
out what course is best to take on an IT project, Java developers
should be glad of all the competition. As all these projects jostle
together, collaborating where they have common interests and competing
where they think they can do better than the others, better platforms
emerge, and that benefits all of us who write Java programs.

Conclusion All is not quiet on the Open Source
front. From simple collaboration to unexpected innovation on platforms
tiny or huge, Java stakes out a vibrant place in the Open Source
pantheon.

Of course, we can't end a discussion about Open Source and Java without
briefly touching on the strong signals coming out of Sun Microsystems
that it will in the not-too-distant future open its Java
implementation. It remains to be seen whether Sun will choose a license
that will actually qualify under the Open Source Definition, but early
indications are that it's listened to people from the FOSS community
and know it has to go all the way.

And then watch in amazement at the hordes who'll be using Open Source. Keep watch at the gates!

Andrew Cowie is a long time Unix and Linux user and advocate, but somewhat unusually was an infantry officer in the Canadian army, having graduated from Royal Military College with a degree in engineering physics. He saw service across North America and a peacekeeping tour in Bosnia. Based in Sydney, Andrew runs Operational Dynamics, a consultancy helping clients worldwide with crisis management. On the technical side, Andrew has extensive experience as a Unix/Linux sysadmin, Java developer, and has long been an Open Source advocate.

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Most Recent Comments

j j09/22/06 08:12:33 PM EDT

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j j09/22/06 08:12:12 PM EDT

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